Shankar Vedantam

And so it was her way of seeing that we shared this in common.

And if I was anywhere in Canada, I doubt she would have come up and started talking to me.

But since we were all the way around the world, that identity was something that bonded us in an unfamiliar situation.

Yeah, so it turns out that one of the most powerful ways to trigger an identity is to be a minority in a situation.

When you're all surrounded by fellow Canadians, you're not thinking about yourself for the most part in terms of being a Canadian.

But it's really powerful when you're both, you know, in a foreign land.

That thing that might otherwise be really mundane becomes really significant to you.

I ran this study in Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada, in collaboration with a colleague who was a professor at Carleton University.

And he set up a table in the Byward Market, which is kind of a famous old market in Ottawa.

And he pulled people who were walking by and offered them a choice between a taste test – they were able to sample honey –

or maple syrup.

And then we randomly flipped a coin and assigned people to one of two conditions.

Half of the people were primed to think about their personal identity.

So they talked about like books they liked as an individual.

The other half of the people were primed to think about their Canadian identity.

And what we found is that when they were primed with their individual identity, they tended to like the taste of honey and maple syrup roughly the same.

But when they were primed with their Canadian identity, they liked the maple syrup more than the honey.

And so what it suggests is that when your identity is salient, it makes you prefer things that are associated with that identity.

And for Canada, maple syrup is one of the big ones.

We literally have the maple leaf on our national flag.